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Sunday, August 31, 2008

Blindsight

Blindsight

It all started with a patient known as GY. GY suffered from a peculiar vision problem. He was completely blind on his left side due to damage to his right visual cortex. When you and I close one of our eyes, the other eye compensates, offering us a fairly broad spectrum of vision. But if a person’s right visual cortex is impaired, he is blind to everything on the left side of his nose. It’s an odd--and I imagine--extremely disorienting condition.

In the late ‘90s, two Oxford researchers, Larry Weiscrantz and Alan Cowey, became preoccupied with this vision problem and recruited GY to undergo a series of tests.